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Reloadable Gift Cards
While less commonly used for manufactured spending purposes, some reloadable gift card products can be viable alternatives for manufactured spending: * Green Dot * PayPal MyCash Cards * Netspend / Reloadits * Serve and Bluebird * OneVanilla Reloads Green Dot Coming soon PayPal MyCash Cards (UPDATE: Dead 5/1/17) Cost for reloads: $3.95 for up to $500 Pros: Cheaper than normal VGC and can easily be liquidated to pay Citi cards Cons: Potentially can get your Paypal account shut down or funds frozen Where to purchase with Credit Card: CVS, Walgreens The details from one of our local experts: PayPal MyCash cards have been a valuable method of MS for me for over a year now, and I've done over 50k of MS this way since July 2015. You can get a $500 MyCash card for $3.95, so the cost of MS is lower than VGCs, and it's easier, because you save the step of buying a MO. Of course, there are other ways that PayPal can be valuable in this game, such as reselling, or using Ink to get 5X through PayPal Digital Gifts. If you do those, or if you otherwise value your PayPal account, then you should ignore what I'm writing right now and have absolutely nothing to do with MyCash. That's because MSing with MyCash causes considerable risk that your PayPal account will get shut down. If, like me, you don't particularly value your PayPal account, and if you would like to do 4k per month in relatively easy MS (and if you have credit cards issued by Citi), then read on. The first step in this process is the get the PayPal Business Debit Mastercard (or for short, PPBDMC). There's no hard pull, and it isn't a credit card, so you shouldn't have any problem getting it. It is a card that links to your PayPal account, and you can set a bank account as backup, and it will give you 1% on purchases that you make that are run as credit (this card used to give 1% on debit purchases, but that doesn't matter now). The only way to connect it to a credit card is if you get the PayPal credit card, and there are some things you can do with that, but I don't do them and so I won't discuss them here. Now, you are ready to buy MyCash cards and load them to your account. PayPal MyCash cards can be purchased from most CVS and Walgreens stores. After purchase, you scratch the stuff off the back to reveal a code, which you input to load the money to your PayPal account. You can only load $500 per day and $4000 per month. The real value in the PPBDMC is that Citi allows you to pay your bill with a debit card, and Citi recognizes PPBDMC as a debit card. For whatever reason, Capital One doesn't recognize PPBDMC as debit, so you can't do this with Capital One. I believe that BoA also allows you to pay your bill with debit, but as I have no BoA credit cards, I do not know whether PPBDMC can be used with them or not. So, what I do every month is: * Buy 4k of MyCash with cards that I want to MS on * Load that into my PayPal account * Call Citi and tell them that I want to pay my bill with my debit card, and unload the PayPal MyCash I loaded At this point, I should point out that the vast majority of people who MS with MyCash have been shut down, and most of them had their PayPal accounts frozen, and they have had to file CFPB complaints to get their money out of their accounts, as PayPal otherwise decided to keep their money for six months. Why did that happen to all of them---and not to me? How have I been able to successfully avoid detection by whatever algorithm the PayPal computers use to find MSers? Most people who got shut down used their PPBDMC to load Serve or Bluebird, or (even worse) they used it to pull money out of an ATM. Those things will get you shut down fast. The only thing that I do with my PayPal account now if pay Citi, and PayPal codes that as a purchase. Additionally, I used my PPBDMC as intended for several months, before buying any MyCash. Earning only 1% cash back isn't that great, but I recommend using your card as credit and putting a few purchases on it for at least a month before buying any MyCash cards. Even then, I didn't max out the 4k per month until over six months had passed. Additionally, I do not clean out my PayPal account. I usually leave $40 or so in the account. I also do not pay Citi the same amount every time, nor to I usually pay in a multiple of $100 (I'll make a payment of $985 or $1030 or something). If you follow my advice, there's a good chance that, like me, you could use MyCash and PPBDMC as an easy and inexpensive way to do a good amount of MS. UPDATE 5/1/2017: DEAD. PayPal appears to be phasing these cards out and they are not available for purchase at any area CVS stores. Instead, PayPal is shifting users to print one-time use barcodes that can be loaded at CVS or RiteAid, but registers are hard-coded for cash loads only, treating the PayPal loads like GreenDots/Reloadits. This is officially dead for MS purposes. Netspend Cards Coming soon Reloadit Packs Coming soon Serve and Bluebird See our dedicated page for Serve and Bluebird OneVanilla Reloads Coming soon Back to Manufactured Spending Home